Memory usage

[Rick Gigger]

I want to know how much memory I've got free on my system.

The free command gives me something like this:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2064832 2046196 18636 0 146892 1736968
-/+ buffers/cache: 162336 1902496
Swap: 2040244 12180 2028064

It would make sense to me that the kernel is sucking up most of my memory
into a bunch of unused buffers and that I actually have a lot more than 18
megs of free memory. Is this the correct interpretation of these numbers?
What is the best way to get a good idea of how much memory I actually have
free on my system.
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[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Wed, Feb 25, 2004 at 02:10:56PM -0700, Rick Gigger wrote:

I want to know how much memory I've got free on my system.

The free command gives me something like this:

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 2064832 2046196 18636 0 146892 1736968
-/+ buffers/cache: 162336 1902496
Swap: 2040244 12180 2028064

It would make sense to me that the kernel is sucking up most of my memory
into a bunch of unused buffers and that I actually have a lot more than 18
megs of free memory. Is this the correct interpretation of these numbers?
What is the best way to get a good idea of how much memory I actually have
free on my system.
Depends what do you mean by "free". If you mean "the amount of memory not used by
anything", that's the free column. If you mean "the amount of memory
that can be allocated by a program without forcing swapping", that's
the free column plus the cached column and probably the buffers column
too.

The buffers and cache are managed by the kernel since totally unused
memory is wasted memory.

Hope this helps,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kl*****@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/ If the Catholic church can survive the printing press, science fiction
will certainly weather the advent of bookwarez.
http://craphound.com/ebooksneitherenorbooks.txt - Cory Doctorow

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